50 Billion Little Pieces

In April, Akismet blocked 1.8 billion spam messages, or 60 million pieces of spam per day, 2.5 million per hour, or 700 per second.

Whoa, that’s a lot of spam.

Akismet, those with long memories will recall, was the first product Automattic ever launched, arriving on October 25th, 2005 – a month before WordPress.com. WordPress sites now attract over 600 million unique visitors each month, according to Quantcast, and WordPress powers 1 in 2 blogs today (including yours truly). 50,000 to 100,000 new blogs launch on WordPress daily, giving spammers a seemingly never-ending network to target.

Of course Akismet runs on many more platforms than just WordPress, and is the standard anti-spam tool used by many of the most popular forum and CMS applications. Those 700 spams per second include not just comments, but forum and blog posts, pingbacks, trackbacks, tweets and more. (Ironically it doesn’t include the FaceBook comments you’ll see on that TechCrunch post; Facebook has its own proprietary anti-spam system).

About 92% of all the items checked by Akismet are spam. That varies considerably depending on the content type: less than half of the forum posts we check are spam, but more than 99.5% of all trackbacks are spam.